Offshorable Economists

In recent years, economists have examined the phenomenon of offshoring.  Offshorable service jobs are characterized by a number of factors.   Jensen and Kletzer note that offshorable jobs have little face-to-face customer contact and work processes that can be monitored via the internet.  Thus, data entry is easily offshorable whereas barbershop services are not. A paper…

What to say in economics seminars

Justin Wolfers writes in the Freakonomics blog that economists should limit their objections during academic seminars to a list of comments to make discussions of research papers more efficient. Here are some of my favorite: Adam Smith said that. Unfortunately, there is an identification problem which is not dealt with adequately in the paper. The…

Surprising insights from the social sciences

What have my fellow brethren of social scientists discovered lately? The Boston Globe summaries some interesting findings such as: Women find men with stubble more attractive than those who are clean shaven or have significant amounts of facial hair. I guess women must think Brett Favre is a sexy dude…whether or not he is retired.…

Explaining the Mortgage Meltdown

NPR’s This American Life has a great episode (“The Giant Pool of Money“) explaining in a non-technical, entertaining manner how the “credit crunch” came upon us. The episode looks at all the parts of the mortgage-backed securities chain: home owners and borrowers, brokers, banks, rating agencies, Wall Street, and foreign and domestic investors. A special…

Serious Economics

For all my economist peers who are sick and tired of monetary policy, financial option valuations, and esoteric econometric specifications, it may be time for a change. The American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) is holding their second annual conference August 14-16 in Portland, Oregon. The AAWE also publishes the Journal of Wine Economics. I…

Economics of Information

Most economics simplify markets and assume that there is one market price. In reality, however, we observe significant price dispersion. Because of this, we see that that searching for the lowest price–while costly–can buyers to superior outcomes. George Stigler (1961) is a seminal paper on the Economics of Information which I will review here. When…